Steve Martin takes his banjo on tour

LOS ANGELES • With no introduction or celebrity fanfare, Steve Martin steps onstage with the Steep Canyon Rangers bluegrass band, a banjo strapped to his chest.

He's not there to tell jokes, though he manages to squeeze in a few. He's there to play music — songs from his Grammy winning bluegrass album, "The Crow: New Songs for the Five-String Banjo."

Martin tells the crowd he met the band at a party in North Carolina, "but when we're in California, I tell people we met in rehab."

With that, he begins to play, with such conviction and skill that he's clearly not joking. A banjo player for 45 years, Martin says he wrote every song in the hour long set, just as he did all 15 tracks on his album, which spent a year atop Billboard's bluegrass charts. He toured the country playing banjo last year and is embarking on a second nationwide tour on April 19. The Steep Canyon Rangers serve as his backup band.

The 64-year-old actor-writer-musician says he fell in love with the banjo the first time he heard it during the 1960s folk music craze.

"It was just the sound of it," Martin said in an interview before taking the stage. "It was like my ears were trying to part away the other instruments and focus on what is that instrument, and I've always loved it."

He told the audience inside the 250-seat Largo theater that he appreciates the banjo's "elements of sadness and melancholy — like the expression on my agent's face when I told him I wanted to do a banjo tour."

When Martin talks about music with a reporter, though, there are no jokes. He approaches the subject with the same earnestness and focus that he does his writing and acting projects, pausing intermittently to pick away on the banjo in his lap.

After spending two months on the road with the Steep Canyon Rangers last year and winning a Grammy in January, Martin has become an accidental ambassador for the banjo and bluegrass music.

He speculates that only half the crowd at any of his concerts are there for the bluegrass and banjo music, "but they all go away very happy."